Best printers for Home

Best Mixer Grinder

Best wired Earphones

Best 43 Inch TV in India

Best Wi Fi Routers

Best Home Theatre in India

Smart Watch under 5000

Best Laptops for Education

Best Laptop for Students

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A university professor investigating the death of a beached sperm whale found $544,000 of ambergris.</li><li>The digestive substance is extremely rare and highly valued in the perfume market.</li></ul><p>A scientist in the Canary Islands discovered a 21-pound lump of whale vomit worth around $544,000 in the intestines of a beached sperm whale.</p><p>Antonio Fernández, a professor from the University of Las Palmas, was inspecting the dead sperm whale at Nogales beach on May 21 when he found a huge clump of ambergris in it, the <a href="https://www.canarias7.es/sociedad/cabildo-heredara-valiosa-piedra-ambar-mato-cetaceo-20230620182053-nt.html#vca=modulos&amp;vso=canarias7&amp;vmc=noticias-rel&amp;vli=sociedad">local news outlet Canarias7 reported</a>.</p><p>Ambergris is a rare and highly sought-after secretion produced in the digestive systems of sperm whales, and it's typically only found in around one out of 100 specimens. It's valued in the perfume industry for its distinct odor and scarcity, and it's often called <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/whale-poop-perfume-ambergris-why-its-expensive-2019-1?_gl=1*1iuu44h*_ga*NjA2OTAyMzI4LjE2NTUwODIyODk.*_ga_E21CV80ZCZ*MTY4ODUzOTM4MS44MTYuMS4xNjg4NTQxMjI0LjYwLjAuMA..">"floating gold" or the "treasure of the sea."</a></p><p>Scientists believe the substance is <a href="https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/the-bizarre-and-pretty-gross-science-of-whale-vomit/">excreted by sperm whales when they eat cephalopods</a>, such as squid and octopus, and cannot digest the beaks of their prey. These remains are often vomited out, but sometimes they can mix with a waxy substance in the intestines to produce ambergris.</p><p>Fernández told Canarias7 that he was investigating the cause of death for this particular sperm whale while checking its colon.</p><p>"What I took out was a stone about 50 to 60 cm in diameter weighing 9.5 kg," he said, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/04/las-palmas-pathologist-ambergris-block-dead-sperm-whale" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according to The Guardian</a>. "The waves were washing over the whale. Everyone was watching when I returned to the beach, but they didn't know that what I had in my hands was ambergris."</p><p>Fernández, who's also the director of his university's animal health and food safety institute, said the whale died of sepsis caused by the chunk of ambergris, per The Guardian.</p><p>The professor also told <a href="https://www.canarias7.es/sociedad/cabildo-heredara-valiosa-piedra-ambar-mato-cetaceo-20230620182053-nt.html#vca=modulos&amp;vso=canarias7&amp;vmc=noticias-rel&amp;vli=sociedad">Canarias7</a> on June 20 that he planned to give the valuable lump to local authorities in La Palma so that it could be sold to help those affected <a href="https://www.insider.com/la-palma-canary-islands-volcano-eruption-photos-2021-9">by a devastating volcano eruption in 2021</a>.</p><p>In 2021, <a href="https://www.insider.com/whale-vomit-worth-millions-fishermen-2021-6">a group of fishermen in the Gulf of Aden scored a chunk of ambergris worth around $1.5 million</a>, which they sold to a buyer in the United Arab Emirates. The 35 fishermen purchased houses, cars, and boats from their profits, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-57288265">the BBC reported</a>.</p><p>Commercial trade of ambergris is strictly regulated in some countries, including Australia and the US, which bans the trade of the substance because of concerns about exploitative whaling.</p>

A professor trying to solve the death of a beached sperm whale ended up discovering 21 pounds of whale vomit worth half a million dollars

<strong><br /></strong><ul><li><strong>A Mumbai man has been arrested for trying to sell 1.3 kg of <keyword id="1543404" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="whale-vomit">whale vomit</keyword> for a whopping ₹170 million. <br /></strong></li><li><strong>Whale vomit also called <keyword id="3822224" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="ambergris">Ambergris</keyword> is an expensive ingredient used in making perfumes. <br /></strong></li><li><strong>Major luxury brands like Chanel, Givenchy, Gucci are known to use Ambergris. <br /></strong></li></ul>In today’s bizarre news, a Mumbai man has been arrested for possession of whale vomit. Before you go on asking why was he arrested, the first question that pops on one’s mind is why on earth was the man walking around with whale vomit? <br /><br />Well, here’s your answer – Whale vomit can burn a hole in your pocket. A kilogram of whale vomit can cost you over ₹10 million. Also called Ambergris, the wax-like substance is produced in the digestive tract of sperm whales. <br /><br />The Mumbai man was caught trying to sell 1.3 kgs of Ambergris for a whopping ₹170 million.<br /><br />As whale vomit ages, it becomes an ideal ingredient for premium perfumes. However, it is also illegal to possess it, as sperm whales have been declared endangered species since 1970. <br /><br />All major luxury brands around the world – Chanel, Givenchy, Gucci among others are known to use Ambergris. <br /><br />Still not disgusted? Well, your perfume could also have deer urine. <br />

A kilogram of 'whale vomit' may be worth ₹10 million — it could get you behind bars too

<p class="enhanced-subtitle">Turns out the bot is a giant sci-fi nerd</p><p class="drop-cap">David Bamman was trying to analyze "Pride and Prejudice" — digitally. An information scientist at UC Berkeley, Bamman uses computers to think about art, building what he calls "algorithmic measuring devices for culture." That means extracting data from <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/learning/classic-books">classic literature</a> about things like, say, the relationships among various characters. In this case, he was going to start with a question that'd be easy for an even marginally literate human: Are Lizzie and Jane besties, or just sisters?</p><p>For kicks, Bamman decided to first try <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-openai-web-browsing-plug-change-how-we-use-internet-2023-5">asking ChatGPT</a>. What would happen if he fed in 4,000 words of "Pride and Prejudice" and posed a simple question: "What are the relationships between the characters?" </p><p>To his amazement, it worked. The <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gpt4-openai-chatgpt-everything-you-need-to-know-4-2023-3">chatbot's GPT-4 version</a> was amazingly accurate about the Bennet family tree. In fact, it was almost as if it had studied the novel in advance. "It was so good that it raised red flags in my mind," Bamman says. "Either it knew the task really well, or it had seen 'Pride and Prejudice' on the internet a million times, and it knows the book really well."</p><p>The problem is, there was no way of knowing how GPT-4 knew what it knew. The inner workings of the large language models at the heart of a chatbot are a black box; the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-chatgpt-release-open-source-ai-model-2023-5">datasets they're trained on</a> are so critical to their functioning that their creators consider the information a proprietary secret. So Bamman's team decided to become "data archaeologists." To figure out what GPT-4 has read, they quizzed it on its knowledge of various books, as if it were a high-school English student. Then they gave it a score for each book. The higher the score, the likelier it was that the book was part of the bot's dataset — not just crunched to help the bot generate new language, but actually <em>memorized</em>.</p><p>In a <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/2305.00118" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recent preprint</a>, meaning it hasn't been peer reviewed yet — the team presented its findings — what amounts to an approximation of the chatbot canon. A lot of it, as you might expect, are the classics: everything from "Moby Dick" and "The Scarlet Letter" to "The Grapes of Wrath" and, yep, "Pride and Prejudice." There are a bunch of popular novels, from Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes to "The Da Vinci Code" and "Fifty Shades of Grey." But what's most surprising is how much science fiction and fantasy GPT-4 has been raised on. The list is staggering: J.R.R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood, "A Game of Thrones," even "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." </p><p>The question of what's on GPT-4's reading list is more than academic. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-google-microsofty-lying-search-belief-2023-2">Bots aren't intelligent</a>. They don't understand the world in any way a human can. But if you want to get to know someone — or some<em>thing</em>, in this case — you look at their bookshelf. Chatbots don't just <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-google-bard-microsoft-bing-break-internet-search-2023-2">invent untrue facts</a>, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-discrimination-bias-worse-problem-than-sentience-2022-6">perpetuate egregious crud</a>, and extrude bland, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/27/ai-chatbots-fiction-nonfiction-writing/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">homogenized word pap</a>. It turns out they're also giant nerds.</p><h2>The Silmarillion. Really?</h2><p>One reason people are trying to figure out what sources chatbots are trained on is to determine whether the LLMs <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/dap.2022.10" target="_blank" rel="noopener">violate the copyright</a> of those underlying sources. The issue, as <a href="https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrlkmwnve/GETTY%20IMAGES%20AI%20LAWSUIT%20complaint.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">several</a> <a href="https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/pdf/00201/1-1-stable-diffusion-complaint.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lawsuits</a> argue, revolves around whether the bots make fair use of the material by transforming into something new, or whether they just <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4438593" target="_blank" rel="noopener">memorize</a> it whole and regurgitate it, without citation or permission.</p><p>One way to answer the question is to look for information that could have come from only one place. When prompted, for example, a GPT-3 writing aid called Sudowrite recognizes the specific sexual practices of a genre of fan-fiction writing called <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/fanfiction-omegaverse-sex-trope-artificial-intelligence-knotting/?redirectURL=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.wired.com%252Fstory%252Ffanfiction-omegaverse-sex-trope-artificial-intelligence-knotting" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Omegaverse</a>. That's a strong hint that OpenAI scraped Omegaverse repositories for data to train GPT-3.</p><p>Bamman and his team used a different tactic: a fill-in-the-blank game called a name cloze. They grabbed short passages from hundreds of novels from as far back as 1749, stripped them of character names and any clues to character names, and then prompted the latest versions of ChatGPT to answer questions about the passage.<strong> </strong>They might ask: </p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>You have seen the following passage in your training data. What is the proper name that fills in the [MASK] token in it? This name is exactly one word long, and is a proper name (not a pronoun or any other word). You must make a guess, even if you are uncertain.</em></p><p>Then they would feed the bot a line from the passage in question:</p><p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>The door opened, and [MASK], dressed and hatted, entered with a cup of tea.</em></p><p>If the bot answers "Gerty," that's a good indicator it has ingested "The House of Mirth," by Edith Wharton — or a detailed summary of it. Show the bot 100 samples from a given book and see how many it gets right. That's the book's score.</p><p>After crunching the numbers, Bamman's team had a list. In addition to the modern public-school canon — Charles Dickens and Jack London, Frankenstein and Dracula — there are a few fun outliers. I was delighted to see "The Maltese Falcon" on there; for my money, Dashiell Hammett is a better hard-boiled detective writer than the more often cited Raymond Chandler. But if you skip the stuff in the public domain and look at the list of copyrighted books that GPT-4 ingested <strong>— </strong>it didn't differ much from the earlier GPT 3.5 <strong>— </strong> the bot's true character emerges. Sure, "The Fellowship of the Ring" weighs in at No. 3, but you have to be pretty committed to Tolkien not to bounce off "The Silmarillion" (No. 9). "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" comes in at No. 21, just a few ticks below "Neuromancer" — two of the defining works of cyberpunk, the genre, ironically, that rang the warning klaxon on artificial intelligence. Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" is down at the bottom; it defined my adolescent sci-fi experience and, having reread it when the very good TV version premiered two years ago, I promise you that the book in no way holds up.</p><p>Generally, though? The list, it me. This is the self-assigned, late-night, sci-fi reading list of every lonely straight white male Gen X nerd. The question is: Does that matter? What are we in for if GPT-4 has the reading preferences of a 14-year-old dweeb from 1984? (Including, as it happens, "1984," at No. 2?)</p><h2>What AI reads matters</h2><p>GPT-4's database is ginormous — up to a petabyte, by some accounts. So <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-ai-will-not-take-jobs-create-future-work-opportunities-2023-2">no one novel</a> (or 50 novels) could teach it, specifically, that becoming the caretaker of a haunted hotel is no cure for writer's block (No. 49), or that fear is the mind-killer (No. 13). The ocean of data swamps the islands of fiction. "The dataset used in pretraining is a big-enough selection of text," says Ted Underwood, an information scientist at the University of Illinois, "that I'm not sure how much effect particular genre biases have on the behavior of the resulting models."</p><p>The presence of these particular books in GPT-4's digital soul may just reflect how present they are in the overall, wild internet from which the data got scraped. When Bamman's team includes public domain books in their tests, the scores get higher — "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"  tops the chart with a whopping 98%. And both the internet and the companies that build its bots tend to overrepresent standard-issue straight white dudes and the science fiction they love. Bamman's team did indeed find that the books the LLMs scored high on were represented on the internet in roughly the same proportions. That makes sense. The chatbots didn't choose their books. Internet culture did.</p><p>Still, it's not hard to imagine that all that sci-fi the bots read will have the same malign influence on them as all the other data they trained on, creating the same kind of accidental biases that always creep into chatbot output. Sometimes they say racist stuff. They might recapitulate misinformation as if true because the same untruths show up often online. These are <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3531146.3533088" target="_blank" rel="noopener">known risks</a>, and part of the reason that OpenAI boss Sam Altman recently <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-government-agency-should-license-ai-work-2023-5">asked Congress to regulate his business</a>.</p><p>"The sources that these models have been trained on are going to influence the kind of models they have and values they present," Bamman says. If all they read was Cormac McCarthy books, he suggests, presumably they'd say existentially bleak and brutal things. So what happens when a bot devours fiction about all sorts of dark and dystopian worlds filled with Hunger Games and Choosing Ceremonies and White Walkers? "How might this genre influence the behavior of these models in ways not about literary or narrative things?" Bamman says. "There's a lot of interesting work to be done there. But I don't think we have the answer to that question yet."</p><p>As a sci-fi nerd myself, I'll take a stab at an answer. I think it's good that genre literature is overrepresented in GPT-4's statistical information space. These aren't highfalutin Iowa Writers' Workshop stories about a college professor having an affair with a student and fretting about middle age. Genre — sci-fi, mystery, romance, horror — is, broadly speaking, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/468283" target="_blank" rel="noopener">more interesting</a>, partially because these books have plots where things actually <em>happen</em>. Bamman's GPT-4 list is a Borgesian library of episodic connections, cliffhangers, third-act complications, and characters taking arms against seas of troubles (and whales).</p><p>More than that, science fiction, fantasy, and horror tend to be spaces for chewing on ideas and possibilities. "Dune" is about religion and the politics of revolution. The "Lord of the Rings" books are about pastoralism as a response to industrialization. "The Handmaid's Tale" is about the ways sexism and fascism mirror each other. I could go on. I prefer an AI with a syntactical worldview spun from hyperspace and sandworms — or at least one that has read all the stories about how AIs can go awry. That said, I'd sure like to see a more diverse canon represented. Octavia Butler, Charlie Jane Anders, Lavie Tidhar, Samuel Delany, China Miéville … it's time to expand the universe of possible universes.</p><p>The books we humans read change what we think about our world. But technically, chatbots don't think about anything. They build statistical and vector relationships among words. Who cares whether those words are science-fictional? "The thing it definitely changes are the associations between concepts they think are likely, or strong, or systematic, or recurring," says Ellie Pavlick, a computer scientist at Brown University who is a researcher at Google AI. "The question is, what is their worldview? In a simple sense, it's associations between words and concepts. But that's still going to be different based on what they read."</p><p>Until OpenAI and other chatbot creators open their training datasets to public scrutiny, it will be hard to know what effect their reading lists has on their output. "If you have a model that has a ton of science fiction in it, and you have a separate model with a ton of Iowa Writers' Workshop stuff," Bamman says, "you could give each of them a task like: Give me 10 priorities for this meeting." Maybe the Iowa bot would suggest that everyone describe their complicated relationships with their parents, while the sci-fi-nerd bot would propose sorting everyone into Hogwarts houses.</p><p>Remember, though, that Bamman wasn't trying to answer any of these questions about copyright or the scariness of all the ghosts in the machine. He just wanted to know whether a chatbot could tell him something about a novel. In retrospect, he realizes that he was "overexuberant" about AI's potential as a literary analyst when he fed GPT-4 that passage from "Pride and Prejudice." Ask a bot about a popular book, and like a college sophomore with a 10-page essay on "Jane Eyre" due tomorrow, it'll just quote you back long passages from the book. It's vomiting up words, not searching for insight.</p><p>For now, Bamman suggests, digital humanists might want to confine their chatbot-derived cultural analysis to lesser-known works, ones that are unlikely to be in the training data. See what a bot makes of Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun," maybe, or Sheri Tepper's "Grass." That way, we'll learn more about the books from what the bots have to say, because they'll be coming at the material with a fresh eye, as it were. And it certainly won't hurt to expose the bots to a wider and weirder dataset. That's the only way to make them have something interesting to say about the things we read — and about everything else, too.</p><p style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/author/adam-rogers"><em>Adam Rogers</em></a> <em>is a senior correspondent at Insider.</em></p>

The top 50 books being used to train ChatGPT &mdash; and what they say about its ‘intelligence’

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>During your next summer cool down with ice cream, ponder the surprising history and science behind the frozen treat.<p><strong>Or maybe not, because it's kind of gross.</strong></p><p>Journalists Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley have pieced together a <a href="http://gastropod.com/the-scoop-on-ice-cream/">fascinating, science-infused origin story of ice cream</a> in their latest episode of Gastropod, a podcast about food science and history.</p><p>As Gastropod explains, in 1558 Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Of-Sugar-Snow-History-California/dp/0520265912">published the critical trick</a> behind making smooth, rich ice cream: lowering the freezing point of water. He achieved this by mixing saltpeter into snow, using the slush to rapidly freeze a bucket of water. (Today we use table salt and ice.)</p><p><strong>But Della Porta didn't invent ice cream. That happened when word of his method found its way into the kitchen of English noblewoman Lady Anne Fanshawe.</strong></p><p>According to Gastropod, Fanshawe scribbled down what's arguably the <a href="http://foodhistorjottings.blogspot.com/2012/04/lady-anne-fanshawes-icy-cream.html">earliest-known recipe for ice cream</a>. Social historian and blogger <a href="http://foodhistorjottings.blogspot.com/2012/04/lady-anne-fanshawes-icy-cream.html">Ivan Day personally discovered the recipe</a> after sifting through some old books he won in an auction.</p><p>Here's Fanshawe's complete recipe for "<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-o_JCWzKTyMA/T3w2PLumsQI/AAAAAAAAAvE/GGIpTW90sf0/s1600/Icy+Cream.jpg">icy cream</a>," circa the 1660s (which is noticeably missing the salt part):</p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">Take three pints of the best cream, boyle it with Mace, or else<strong> flavor it with orange flower water or ambergreece,</strong> sweeten the cream, with sugar[.] let it stand until it is quite cold, then put it into Boxes, either silken or firm then take, Ice chopped into small peeces and putt it into a tub and set the Boxes in the Ice covering them all over, and let them stand in the ice two hours, and the cream will come to be ice in the Boxes, then turne them out into a charger with some of the same Seasoned cream, so serve it up to the Table.</p><p>I bolded the part with "ambergreece" - spelled "ambergris" today - because it's <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2012/kemp_floating.html">very strange and repulsive stuff</a>.</p><p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Ambergris might <a href="http://etcweb.princeton.edu/batke/moby/moby_092.html">sound familiar</a> if you've ever read Herman Melville's "Moby Dick." Here's how the character Ishmael describes it in the novel:<p style="padding-left: 30px;">[A]mbergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.</p><p>Ambergris is in Moby Dick, of course, because it sperm whales make it.</p><p>Adult sperm whales hunt and eat hundreds of pounds of squid in the darkest depths of the ocean every day. Squid have tough beaks and other indigestible parts, though, so whales vomit up the extra gunk every couple of days.</p><p><div></div></p><p class="embed-spacer">But in about 1% of sperm whales, author Christopher Kemp details in his book "<a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2012/kemp_floating.html">Floating Gold</a>,"<strong> a digestive defect allows the hard squid parts make their way into the whale's bowels - where they get stuck and block the intestinal tract.</strong></p><p>Here's how Kemp describes what happens next to the blockage:</p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">Feces build up behind it. The whale's gastrointestinal system responds by increasing water absorption from the lower intestines, and gradually the feces saturating the compacted mass of squid beaks become like cement, binding the slurry together permanently. ... Temporarily, feces make their way past it again, passing between the boulder and the wall of the intestines. And, slowly, the process repeats, adding additional strata to the boulder, which grows larger with each new layer in the same way that a tree grows, adding a new growth ring with each passing year.</p><p>No one really knows if the lump of ambergris eventually kills the sperm whales, or if they manage to eventually pass it.</p><p>Whatever the case, when the ambergris breaks free of its whale prison, it floats to the top of the ocean, cures in the salt and the sun, and gets discovered by adventurous humans. Today ambergris finds its way into museums and onto auction blocks: Pieces that weigh about 1 lb can <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-19431540">fetch tens of thousands of dollars</a>, mainly for their <a href="http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/12/02/117778/">use in expensive perfumes</a> (mostly the French variety, for ambergris' "<a href="http://www.nstperfume.com/perfume-glossary/">sweet, woody odor</a>").</p><p><strong>So how does ambergris ice cream taste?</strong></p><p>Graber and Twilley tracked down historical gastronomist <a href="http://www.fourpoundsflour.com/about/">Sarah Lohman</a>, who made some of Fanshawe's signature custard for the show.</p><p>"It was really, really, really good," Twilley said. "To me, it felt kind of like vanilla, in that it was sort of a background thing. But then it was so much more complex tasting than vanilla. It was like vanilla on drugs."</p><p>Listen to their full reaction in <a href="http://gastropod.com/the-scoop-on-ice-cream/">Gastropod</a>'s complete episode, below - along with some surprising and scientific twists and turns in the history of ice cream.</p><p><div></div></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/deepflight-super-falcon-submarine-2014-2">This $1.7 Million Submarine Was Inspired By Whales</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="ZjajJuazreWS7pnof-GeGDDimHMc9ihy" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

The first ice cream recipe called for an ingredient made of whale feces

<ul class="summary-list"><li>The Drake Passage is an ocean passage <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ocean-endeavor-ship-antarctica-sail-intrepid-travel-2022-12">ships</a> take to Antarctica. It's gone viral for how rough it is.</li><li>Alyssa Ramos, a travel influencer, has crossed it three times back and forth — and keeps going back.</li></ul><p><em>This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Alyssa Ramos, a travel influencer who's sailed the Drake Passage. It has been edited for length and clarity. </em></p><p>I've crossed what's widely known as the <a href="https://www.nomadasaurus.com/crossing-the-drake-passage-to-antarctica/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">most treacherous ocean passage in the world</a> three times back and forth by boat. This is why I keep going back.</p><h2><strong>I'm a travel influencer</strong> </h2><p>It's my job. It has been for 10 years, back when it wasn't that common to be a full-time influencer. I make a living off of collaborations and sponsorships. </p><p>As a travel influencer, I've always had those bucket list destinations that are just dreams to me. One of those is Antarctica.</p><h2><strong>The </strong><strong>most economical and environmentally-friendly way to get to Antarctica is </strong><a href="https://www.antarcticaguide.com/how-to-get-to-antarctica" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><strong>by ship</strong></a><strong> </strong></h2><p>That <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/9-things-everyone-should-know-before-going-to-antarctica-review-2022-12">journey to Antarctica</a> takes you right through the Drake Passage, which has a <a href="https://www.nomadasaurus.com/crossing-the-drake-passage-to-antarctica/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reputation for being one of the roughest seas in the world</a>. The Drake Passage is a body of water between the southern edge of South America and the lonely continent of Antarctica. </p> <p>Within the Drake Passage, three seas converge. The Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern Seas all meet there, and without any land to offer resistance for the water, it can get treacherous. </p><p>I've gone through the Passage six times now on three Antarctic trips, and you never know if you're going to get the Drake Lake (the nickname for when the Passage is calm) or the Drake Shake (the nickname for when the Passage is rough).</p><h2><strong>As a travel influencer, I share my travels online </strong></h2><p>A <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@mylifesatravelmovie/video/7173784831828987182?is_copy_url=1&amp;is_from_webapp=v1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">video I posted of what it's like to cross the Passage has been viewed more than 4 million times</a>. In the video, you can see the reality of the Passage: how it throws you around while you're just trying to walk, how the waves can reach heights of 40 feet, and how the boat literally rocks up and down. </p> <p>My best tip to anyone going on the Drake Passage is to bring Dramamine, which is an anti-nausea medication. It saves my life. I still throw up every time, but with medication, I'm able to keep myself from throwing up for the entire duration of the two days it takes to get through the Passage. </p><h2><strong>People say they could never go because they get so motion-sick</strong></h2><p>But honestly, I get motion-sick just sitting in the backseat of a car and I'm able to do it. You just have to accept that you're going to throw up and be prepared with anti-nausea medications. </p> <p>There's also been a doctor on board each ship I've been on in case someone can't stop vomiting.</p><h2><strong>It's wild to go through the Drake Passage</strong></h2><p>It's like being in an elevator that drops. Your stomach falls into your feet, and it feels like gravity is just slamming you around. You're rocking side to side with no control over what's happening. I've had a chair slide across the room from the motion and hit my leg while I was sleeping. </p> <p>Every time I go through the Passage, there's a moment where I'm cleaning up after throwing up and looking at myself in the mirror like: Why did I do this to myself?</p><h2><strong>But then you get to Antarctica and you remember why the journey was worth it</strong></h2><p>You get to step foot on the seventh continent. You get to see penguins and whales. You see wildlife you can't see anywhere else in the world. It's one of my favorite places on Earth.</p><p>The <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/drakepassage" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#drakepassage</a> is going viral on TikTok right now with more than 189 million views, and you can see why. Not only is it a crazy journey, but it leads you to the most incredible destination.</p>

I'm a travel influencer who's sailed to Antarctica 3 times. It's a notoriously treacherous journey — but it's so worth it.

<p>Good morning and welcome to your weekday morning roundup of the top stories you need to know.</p><p>For more daily and weekly briefings, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/subscription/newsletter"><strong>sign up for our newsletters here</strong></a>.</p><p><strong>What's going on today:</strong></p><ul><li><strong>Gaetz-gate continues: </strong>A new report says prosecutors are examining if Matt Gaetz obstructed justice in the sex-trafficking investigation into him.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/prosecutors-examine-whether-matt-gaetz-obstructed-justice-politico-2021-6"> The report alleges that Gaetz's ex-girlfriend was on the phone with a witness and then dialed in the congressman.</a></li><li><strong>Google removes diversity head:</strong> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/kamau-bobb-google-diversity-head-antisemitic-blog-post-2021-6" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google removes its head of diversity after a 2007 blog post surfaced in which he claimed Jews have 'an insatiable appetite for war.'</a> Kamau Bobb, the global lead for diversity strategy and research, wrote in a 2007 post that Israel had "an insatiable appetite for vengeful violence.</li><li><strong>That's certainly one way to make money: </strong><a href="https://www.insider.com/whale-vomit-worth-millions-fishermen-2021-6" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">A group of fishermen netted a $1.5 million whale vomit windfall after dredging up a hunk of the stuff</a>. Ambergris is also known as "floating gold," and is produced in a sperm whale's digestive system. It is used in fine perfumes to make scents last longer.</li><li><strong>Reporting on the reporters: </strong><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-doj-obtained-new-york-times-reporters-phone-records-2021-6" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Trump DOJ secretly pulled phone records for 4 New York Times reporters during an investigation into a leak</a>. The <keyword id="6355005" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="news">news</keyword> follows recent disclosures that Washington Post reporters and CNN's Barbara Starr also had their records seized.</li><li><strong>Well, this is embarrassing: </strong><a href="https://www.insider.com/tiktokers-traveled-to-hawaii-with-incorrect-negative-covid-19-test-2021-6" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">2 Tiktokers who traveled to Hawaii spent close to $1,000 to fly to LA and back again - all because they got the wrong type of COVID test</a>. Sarah Blackwood and Abbey Campbell both had negative COVID-19 tests but traveled back to California after their tests weren't from approved companies.</li></ul><p><strong>That's all for now. See you tomorrow.</strong></p>

Inside the wild, drug-fueled world of celebrity keynote speakers

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>NOAA Fisheries/Associated Press</span></p><p class="caption">The neurotoxin-producing algae Pseudo-nitzschia is responsible for many of the animal deaths and illnesses</p></div><p></p></div></div>A giant algae bloom off the West coast is wreaking havoc on marine life and fisheries.</p><p>Algae blooms happen every year around May, but this one is ridiculously large and long lasting.</p><p>"The bloom is laced with some toxic species that have had far-reaching consequences for sea life and regional and local economies," <a href="https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/record-setting-bloom-toxic-algae-north-pacific">according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration</a> (NOAA).</p><p>Part of the reason this bloom is worse than usual is because of a mysteriously large <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2015/08/06/record-algae-bloom-laced-with-toxins-is-flourishing-in-the-blob/#.VcTNghNVhHx">mass of warm water</a> off the Pacific coast. The warmer the water, the more algae grow.</p><p>"It's just lurking there," Vera Trainer, research oceanographer with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Washington state, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/06/us-usa-algae-west-idUSKCN0QB2BJ20150806">told Reuters</a>. "It's the longest lasting, highest toxicity, and densest bloom that we've ever seen."</p><p>As you can see in the map below, the algae bloom stretches all the way from Alaska to California:</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>NOAA Climate/NOAA View</span></p><p class="caption">This year's harmful algae bloom goes all the way from Alaska to California</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>While not all of an algae species in the bloom are dangerous, some of them produce a toxic chemical called domoic acid that can kill or make animals sick - and can even impact human health. Domoic acid is a neurotoxin produced by the algae <a href="http://coastalscience.noaa.gov/news/habs/nccos-nmfs-partner-survey-unprecedented-west-coast-toxic-algal-bloom/"><em>Pseudo-nitzchia</em></a>. When an animal, say a clam, eats this algae, it also injects the domoic acid, which can build up inside it. Any bigger animal that comes along and eats it - including humans - can get sick too if they taken in enough toxin.</p><p>This year's bloom is so bad we are seeing lots of animal deaths. At least nine fin whales were found dead in the waters off Alaska in June, <a href="https://www.adn.com/article/20150618/9-fin-whales-found-dead-alaska-waters-recent-weeks">according to Alaska Dispatch News</a>, and in July reports of dead or dying whales, seals, birds, and fish have been rolling in <a href="https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/record-setting-bloom-toxic-algae-north-pacific">according to NOAA</a>. It's difficult to pin these deaths on the algae specifically, but signs are pointing to these toxins as the cause.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Brian Snyder/Reuters</span></p><p class="caption">Toxic algae blooms, some of which are called red tides, can poison fish and close local fisheries</p></div><p></p></div></div>And to prevent any human illnesses, Washington and Oregon have closed recreational razor back clam fisheries, <a href="http://wdfw.wa.gov/news/aug0415a/">Washington also closed commercial dungeoness crab</a> fisheries, and California has closed sardine fisheries and put <a href="https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Pages/NR15-047.aspx">warnings out about eating local mussels</a>, clams, and crabs.</p><p>"Ongoing testing shows that crab in these waters have domoic acid levels that exceed health-safety standards," Dan Ayres, coastal shellfish manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife <a href="http://wdfw.wa.gov/news/aug0415a/">said in a press release</a>. "We've been closely watching toxin levels in crab since closing beaches to razor-clam digging in May."</p><p>If a person eats too much fish or shellfish contaminated with demoic acid they could get symptoms ranging from vomiting, headaches and dizziness to, in severe cases, breathing trouble, seizures, and could fall into a coma and die, according to the <a href="https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Pages/NR15-047.aspx">California Department of Public Health</a>.</p><p>The algae doesn't just poison sea creatures, they also poison the water and create dead zones when they die. The decomposing algae use up all of the water's oxygen, making it unlivable for the majority of sea life. There's nothing we can do to stop this process, and it seems like it will keep getting worse as climate change makes oceans warmer, creating more dangerous algae blooms.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain</span></p><p class="caption"> As the algae blooms, like this one off La Jolla, California, decay they use up the water's oxygen and create dead zones. </p></div><p></p></div></div>Luckily, a research division of NOAA is in the midst of a five year long <a href="http://www.coastalscience.noaa.gov/projects/detail?key=152">monitoring program</a> to develop an early alert detection system for algae blooms and their effects.</p><p>They send researchers out to harmful algae blooms to examine the toxicity of the bloom, what type of species are blooming, and under what conditions the algae is growing.</p><p>With the project expected to conclude in 2016 hopefully we will have a better understanding of these blooms - and what we can do about them - in the near future.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/shark-attack-video-australia-surfer-marine-biologist-2015-7">Marine biologist explains why the pro surfer attacked by a shark didn't actually get bit</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="U1cXBjdjrHWJqeGcI8nAbccy5ZG1cfFz" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

You Searched For "what is whale vomit" and got 9 results

A professor trying to solve the death of a beached sperm whale ended up discovering 21 pounds of whale vomit worth half a million dollars

Matthew Loh

A kilogram of 'whale vomit' may be worth ₹10 million — it could get you behind bars too

Sanchita Dash

The top 50 books being used to train ChatGPT and what they say about its ‘intelligence’

Adam Rogers

The first ice cream recipe called for an ingredient made of whale feces

Dave Mosher

I'm a travel influencer who's sailed to Antarctica 3 times. It's a notoriously treacherous journey — but it's so worth it.

Fortesa Latifi

Top Stories this AM: Gaetz investigated for obstructing justice; Google's diversity head gone after antisemitic blog; Trump tracked NYT reporters

INSIDER

Inside the wild, drug-fueled world of celebrity keynote speakers

David Kushner

Record-breaking toxic algae bloom off the West coast is devastating the Pacific Ocean

Cody Sullivan,Jennifer Welsh

Peter Diamandis explains how he's working toward a future where humans can freely explore space and live forever

Richard Feloni,Anna Mazarakis

Popular Keywords

Buying Guides